AeyalGross, Law School TAU, a radical academic and an activist in the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender (GLBT) movement has turned toNewspeakto solve a dilemma.

Israel has a liberal record on GLBT issues; the Israeli Defense Force was one of the first military forces in the world to allow openly gay and lesbian soldiers to serve in its ranks. Members of the GLBT community are represented in the Knesset and are prominent in the cultural life of the country. In 2005 the Tourism Ministry took a lead in welcoming gay visitors. This situation contrasts with the fate of gays in manyMuslim countriesincluding the West Bank and Gaza strip, where they are harassed, persecuted and often sentenced to death.

For Gross and his fellow radical academics, such a comparison is threatening as it undermines their effort to paint Israel's human rights record in black.

Enter "pink" to the rescue. Gross is the "intellectual father" of the theory of "Pinkwashing Israel;" it asserts that the government has used the gay community to hide its abysmal human rights record with regard to Palestinians and other minorities.

Gross'sploy seems to be working; it has enabled the anti-Israel community around the world to ignore serious human rights violations in Muslim societies. Indeed, a recent op-ed in the New York Times quotes Gross and repeats his argument that gay rights are a tool of Israeli public relations propaganda and bashes Israel for its human rights record (see below). This is definitely a triumph for Gross and an indication that 1948 is alive and well in 2011.

“IN dreams begin responsibilities,” wrote Yeats in 1914. These words resonate with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people who have witnessed dramatic shifts in our relationship to power. After generations of sacrifice and organization, gay people in parts of the world have won protection from discrimination and relationship recognition. But these changes have given rise to a nefarious phenomenon: the co-opting of white gay people by anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim political forces in Western Europe and Israel.

In the Netherlands, some Dutch gay people have been drawn to the messages ofGeertWilders, who inherited many followers of the assassinated anti-immigration gay leaderPimFortuyn, and whose Party for Freedom is now the country’s third largest political party. In Norway, Anders BehringBreivik, the extremist who massacred 77 people in July, cited BruceBawer, a gay American writer critical of Muslim immigration, as an influence. The Guardian reported last year that the racist English Defense League had 115 members in its gay wing. The German Lesbian and Gay Federation has issued statements citing Muslim immigrants as enemies of gay people.

These depictions of immigrants — usually Muslims of Arab, South Asian, Turkish or African origin — as “homophobic fanatics” opportunistically ignore the existence of Muslim gays and their allies within their communities. They also render invisible the role that fundamentalist Christians, the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jews play in perpetuating fear and even hatred of gays. And that cynical message has now spread from its roots in European xenophobia to become a potent tool in the long-running Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2005, with help from American marketing executives, the Israeli government began a marketing campaign, “Brand Israel,” aimed at men ages 18 to 34. The campaign, as reported by The Jewish Daily Forward, sought to depict Israel as “relevant and modern.” The government later expanded the marketing plan by harnessing the gay community to reposition its global image.

Last year, the Israeli news siteYnetreported that the TelAvivtourism board had begun a campaign of around $90 million to brand the city as “an international gay vacation destination.” The promotion, which received support from the Tourism Ministry and Israel’s overseas consulates, includes depictions of young same-sex couples and financing for pro-Israeli movie screenings at lesbian and gay film festivals in the United States. (The governmentisn’talone; an Israeli pornography producer even shot a film, “Men of Israel,” on the site of a former Palestinian village.)

This message is being articulated at the highest levels. In May, Prime Minister BenjaminNetanyahutold Congress that the Middle East was “a region where women are stoned, gays are hanged, Christians are persecuted.”

The growing global gay movement against the Israeli occupation has named these tactics “pinkwashing”: a deliberate strategy to conceal the continuing violations of Palestinians’ human rights behind an image of modernity signified by Israeli gay life.AeyalGross, a professor of law at TelAvivUniversity, argues that “gay rights have essentially become a public-relations tool,” even though “conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic.”

Pinkwashingnot only manipulates the hard-won gains of Israel’s gay community, but it also ignores the existence of Palestinian gay-rights organizations. Homosexuality has been decriminalized in the West Bank since the 1950s, when anti-sodomy laws imposed under British colonial influence were removed from the Jordanian penal code, which Palestinians follow. More important is the emerging Palestinian gay movement with three major organizations:Aswat, AlQawsand Palestinian Queers for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. These groups are clear that the oppression of Palestinians crosses the boundary of sexuality; asHaneenMaikay, the director of AlQaws, has said, “When you go through a checkpoint it does not matter what the sexuality of the soldier is.”

What makes lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their allies so susceptible topinkwashing— and its corollary, the tendency among some white gay people to privilege their racial and religious identity, a phenomenon the theoristJasbirK.Puarhas called “homonationalism” — is the emotional legacy of homophobia. Most gay people have experienced oppression in profound ways — in the family; in distorted representations in popular culture; in systematic legal inequality that has only just begun to relent. Increasing gay rights have caused some people of good will to mistakenly judge how advanced a country is by how it responds to homosexuality.

In Israel, gay soldiers and the relative openness of TelAvivare incomplete indicators of human rights — just as in America, the expansion of gay rights in some states does not offset human rights violations like mass incarceration. The long-sought realization of some rights for some gays should not blind us to the struggles against racism in Europe and the United States, or to the Palestinians’ insistence on a land to call home.

SarahSchulmanis a professor of humanities at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York.

Israeli GLBT Politics between Queerness and Homonationalism

July 3, 2010

ByAeyalGross

AeyalGross is Associate Professor of Law in Tel-AvivUniversity, and Visiting Reader at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Debates abouthomonationalismseemed to be at the focal point of Pride 2010. International attention was lavished on two events in particular. In Germany,Judith Butler refused to accept the Berlin Pride Civil Courage Award, in protest of growing commercialism, complacency towards racism, and the exploitation of GLBT and queer people by war mongers. Across the ocean at Toronto Pride,activists tried and failed to censor the words “Israeli Apartheid” (and hence the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid). At the same time, with less international attention, related questions were also at the heart of heated debates about the nature of the annual pride parade in TelAviv.

In 2001, after the beginning of the second Intifada, a group of friends – myself included – decided that given the egregious human rights violations in the occupied territories, they could not take part in the pride parade as usual. Instead, they would march as a group, dressed in black and carrying a banner declaring “There is no pride in the occupation.” The group attracted a great deal of attention, both at the parade itself and later in the local and international press. This led to the founding of the queer-radical activist group Black Laundry. In subsequent years, even after Black Laundry was disbanded, informal groups carried banners with similar slogans in the TelAvivparade, as well as in other parades held in Israel, and were sometimes dubbed the “black-pink coalition.”

Those years also saw advances in the protection of gay and lesbian rights in Israel, primarily through litigation, combined with some legislation, continuing a process that started in the late 1980’s. At the same time with Israel continuing its policies of violence and occupation directed at the Palestinians, the government and its advocates began to use gay rights as a fig leaf for Israeli democracy. What was originally a piecemeal effort has in recent years become a well-documented, orchestrated campaign, in which gay rights in Israel and the relative liberalism of Israeli society in this area are flaunted and used to paint a picture of Israel as a progressive liberal democracy.

The recent use of the term “pinkwashing” to describe Israel’s use of gay rights for propaganda, patterned on “greenwashing,” may be somewhat misleading. Whereasgreenwashersonly pretend to “go green,” Israel and its advocates often co-opt advances in gay rights that actually took place, to push forward a nationalist agenda. While Israel’s record on gay and more generally LGBT rights is far from perfect, there is no denying that considerable progress has been made. As a matter of fact if we want to fully understand the role of LGBT rights in Israelihomonationalism, we must not deny the progress that actually took place, but rather engage in further comprehension and analysis of this process. We should also not erase the hard work of activists and the hardly won achievements.

Although this is not the forum for an exhaustive analysis of how and why did LGBT rights develop as they did in Israel, we must note that the movement for LGBT rights became increasingly powerful and visible in the 1990’s, a decade when Israel in general underwent a process of liberalization, elected a progressive government, and entered into a (now failed) peace process. In the past, it was widely assumed that LGBT rights would correlate with advances in civil rights and the peace process. Today the opposite may be true: LGBT rights are used as a fig leaf, and the larger the area that needs to be hidden, the larger the fig leaf must be. Although conservative and especially religious politicians remain fiercely homophobic, this is partially counterbalanced – even in years when a conservative government has been in power – by the newhomonationalismand the important role gay rights plays in burnishing Israel’s liberal image.

At the time the Israeli version ofhomonationalismwas coming into its own, the Israeli LGBT community received political support almost exclusively from the left. Only those progressively minded politicians actively concerned with civil rights generally came out in support of LGBT rights. While this did not prevent the development ofhomonationalism, it did preclude a full scale “deal” between Israeli nationalism and the LGBT community.

The presence of former Foreign MinisterZippiLivni, a member of the centristKadimaparty, at the opening of the June 2009 Pride events was evidence of a shift in the relationship between LGBT and general politics. The sea change occurred two months later. On August 1, 2009, At 22:40, a masked gunman entered the basement apartment that is home toAguda, Israel’s oldest LGBT group, and shot indiscriminately at the people who had come to the weekly meeting of BarNoar, a LGBT youth group.NirKatz, 24, a counselor in the group, and LizTrubishi, 17, were killed. Twelve others were injured, some seriously. It is likely that two of the victims will be wheelchair bound for the rest of their lives. This horrific event traumatized the Israeli LGBT community, and the aftershocks will undoubtedly be felt for years to come.

For the purpose of this discussion, my argument is that one of the effects of the murder was that it allowed Israeli right wing politicians who are gay friendly to come out of the closet as such: if before the fear of hostile reaction by their conservative constituency prevented them from speaking openly for gay rights, and their support was always minimal and closeted, than the universal condemnation of the murder allowed them to “come out” with their support and speak out for gay rights. This change allowed the cementing of an unwritten deal that had long been in the works, between Israeli establishedhomonormativepolitics and the new Israelihomonationalism. The mass rally in TelAviva week after the murder, at which two senior right-wing cabinet ministers spoke, was a significant moment in this process. Although it did include critical and dissident voices, it also brought thehomonormativeandhomonationalistpolitics together as has never happened before and was thus crucial for the “deal”. Its terms are that “we” will be good, normative and Zionist gays, who are willing to partake in the discourse of Israel as a liberal democracy and collaborate, directly and indirectly, in the state’s use of gay rights as a fig leaf for Israeli democracy, and in return we will get sympathy and some support from the state.

It seems that each party seized the day to advance its own agenda. Now, not only Israel as a state, but also right wing politicians, could utilize gay rights to consider themselves as liberal and democratic, while continuing to support oppressive policies towards the Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories. The question that remains is who benefits from this deal and who does not, and by extension, who pays the price, and what the price actually is. One cost of the deal is the requirement that LGBT people who do not fulfill the gay side of the deal – by maintaining sexual, gender, and especially politicalnormativity– keep a low profile. LGBT activists are supposed to stay silent about the crimes committed by the government, particularly in the context of the occupation, and if they do not, someone will try to silence them.

The deal deepened the rift between the different groups, with one side composed of the leaders of the majority of mainstream Israeli LGBT organizations and the other the queer and radical activists who reject the terms of the deal and refuse to remain quiet. Disagreements about the proper response to the BarNoarbloodshed and the program for the rally the following week created an atmosphere of distrust and alienation. Almost a year later, the issues came up again in the discussions concerning Tel-AvivPride. Activists were concerned that the parade would be de-politicized, i.e. it would not address the broader context of oppression, but rather provide another opportunity for branding Israel as a gay heaven and therefore the epitome of liberalism. As the date for the 2010 pride parade approached, a group of queer-radical activists decided to hold an alternative parade a few hours before the municipality-sponsored parade. (While some activists marched in both the alternative and the municipal parades, others took part in a smaller alternative parade that took place at the same time as the municipal one).

The decision to hold an alternative parade rather than march in the main parade as a queer-radical bloc, coincided with the identity-politics-based splintering of the queer bloc, which in previous years would march at the municipality-sponsored parade. Many of the groups from which the “pink-black” bloc drew significant numbers of its participants, now chose to march in the parade as identity based groups, such as the transgender group, bisexuals,femmes, etc. While clearly the visibility of these groups is important, especially in the face of their erasure from representation, it is also necessary to consider the effect of this on the possibility of queer, rather than identity, politics.

Almost a year after the murder in BarNoar, we see that the community is not united in a battle against homophobia. Instead, the “deal” struck in its aftermath aligned the newly invigoratedhomonationalismwithhomonormativityand exacerbated the conflicts between Israeli LGBT and queer activists, as was all-too apparent in the contentious period before the pride parade. There is more need than ever for queer politics which will rejecthomonationalism, while not denying the progress achieved on GLBT rights and the need to join efforts in fighting homophobia, a need that is more apparent than ever in the wake of the BarNoarmurder.